Obama’s Budget- Better than 4 Years Ago?

For all the accreditations given to Ronald Reagan, perhaps the greatest contribution he made to the political arena was a simple appeal to the logical minds of voters- Are you better off than you were 4 years ago? During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan’s strategy was simple. Let people look at the facts, the result of Carter’s policies, and see if they were really benefiting them.

Many people have compared Obama to Carter, and draw parallels between this election and the 1980 election. So, what could be more apt than to look at the Obama economy and ask, are you better off than you were 4 years ago?

The simple answer, based on Obama’s own economic numbers, is no.

Obama once promised that by the middle of this decade annual spending would match annual revenue and the government would not be adding to the federal deficit.

Yet, under his own budget, the Obama Plan for America, his best and smallest month of spending would add 608 billion dollars to the debt. That projection stays the same even if Obama serves a second term. That’s 33% worse than Bush’s worst month, where he added 458 billion dollars to the deficit.

And after 2015, Obama’s stated end of increases to the federal debt, the debt continues to grow. It continues to increase until 2021 when projections stop, to an estimated deficit of over 700 billion. Again, these numbers are according to Obama’s budget.

These numbers don’t even include the Congressional Budget Office’s projections for Obamacare. Obama claimed the cost of his healthcare plan would be 900 billion dollars over ten years. But the CBO estimates that the first full decade of implementation for Obamacare will cost 2.6 trillion dollars, nearly 3 times as much as Obama stated.

So, according to Obama’s own projected deficit numbers, the American people are not better off than they were 4 years ago, and based on the CBO’s projected cost of Obamacare and Obama’s own projected spending levels, it’s unlikely they’ll be better off in another 4 years.

About Katherine Revello

A recent graduate of the University of Maine, where she majored in journalism and political science, Katherine Revello is an aspiring political commentator. Her focuses include theory, the philosophy of money and populism. Currently, she is a graduate student at Villanova University. She is the founder of The Politics of Discretion, a blog dedicated to advancing her philosophy of discretionism. Follow her on Twitter: @MrsWynandPapers